This week I got a fresh machine from ServerBeach to play with, and thought it would be interesting to jot down what I do with a server before I consider it usable. The preinstalled OS is Fedora Core 6.

The order here is not chronological; more a general overview of steps.

Updating existing packages

Easy step: yum upgrade

Replacement of some default packages

Uninstalled the httpd package and all dependencies in favour of compiling the Apache HTTP Daemon myself. I never understood why Red Hat decided on the scattered structure with their package, so I install Apache from source to make sure it is all self-contained in /usr/local/apache2. Also for this machine I added the ITK MPM to run each vhost as a seperate user.

Enabled Bind and set it up to serve as resolver for the machine by forwarding to existing resolvers. This greatly helps with lookup speeds when doing lots of lookups for the same hostname, such as Sendmail and Apache will be doing.